


Been So Long

by blithers



Category: New Girl
Genre: Drunkenness, F/M, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-30
Updated: 2013-04-30
Packaged: 2017-12-10 00:31:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/779734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's like a plot from a damn sitcom.  They never talk about it.  It seems unreal.  It’s like something that happened to two entirely different people.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Been So Long

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [Nick + Jess First Time Commentficathon](http://kyrafic.livejournal.com/23966.html). Set during the season one episode "Wedding", but with general spoilers through season two. Thank you so much to [kyrafic](http://kyrafic.livejournal.com) for the last minute beta read!

He's friends with the photo booth. No, scratch that: he's _best friends_ with the photo booth. It sees him for who he is and keeps on keeping on, and he has nothing but the deepest of love and respect for that. Nick figures he'll get married in the photo booth, maybe stick around and pop out a couple kids while he's at it - keep it in the family, you know, the two of them against the world. Booth brothers. Solving crimes, cracking wise, doing awesome stuff in slow motion while explosions go off behind them and they dramatically put sunglasses on and/or take them off.

 _Booth brothers_.

"Photo booth," he slurs, and rests his cheek against the cool plastic wall. "You get it. You get where I'm coming from. How are you so _good_ at this? What's your secret, man?"

The photo booth doesn't say anything.

Nick thinks that's the canniest move of all. Nothing but respect. _Nothin'_. He thumps his chest once and points at the camera lens.

"...Nicholas?" Jess's voice is tentative. "Nick?" She pokes her head in the curtain, hair all bouncy and curly and wild. Nick has an instinctive distrust of Jess's hair like this - it's like something out of a damn fairy tale, or one of those lady-shampoo ads with lots of tropical flowers. "Can I come in?"

"Jeeeessss," he says grandly. He slides over an inch on the bench.

She squeezes herself in next to him, shoving her purse under an armpit to fit everything in. Her lips tilt downward in a determined frown, like folding both of them into a tiny photo booth is a jigsaw puzzle she can solve through sheer force of personality.

And Jess is warm and smells like clean soap and sweat from dancing and something faintly floral ( _those damn tropical flowers, he knew it, never let it be said that Nick Miller doesn't know from his girl stuff_ ). It's kind of overwhelming in the small space. It's breaking up the mano-a-mano vibe he had going on, just him and the booth, a man and his mechanical photographic man-cave: just as God intended.

"You okay?" Jess asks, her body tilted in toward his.

He nods seriously. "Caroline," he starts, and wrinkles his brow, searching for the right words to explain the feelings bubbling inside of him: his _loneliness_ and the way that he would sink his fingers into Caroline's hair when he kissed her, until she went all shivery and pliant under his fingertips. How in college Caroline would throw on his old Syracuse sweatshirt and make them coffee, her hair going this way and that, messed up in a way that was only for him. And he misses her, he misses her _so fucking much_ that it's like a weight on his chest, pressing all the air out of his lungs, making it so he can't breathe or think right or function like a normal human being.

"...Caroline, boyfriend, sad," he concludes, and frowns deeply to illustrate his point.

"I'm sorry about Caroline," Jess says gently. She puts her hand on top of his hand. "But, Nick, you're going to be okay. You have all of us. We're always here for you when you feel sad. And Caroline doesn’t deserve you. You know that, right?"

Jess's legs are bare where her skirt hits mid-thigh. Have skirts always been this indecent? Jess's skirt is super short and her legs are smooth and naked and pressed up against his suit trousers. He wants to draw his finger down the length of her bare leg. He wants to trace the line of her shin to the delicate bones of the foot and her stupidly hot shoes, strappy heeled numbers with a single tiny buckle.

He knows it's a bad idea. He's losing his grip on _why_ it's a bad idea.

"Sure," he mumbles. He twists his hand around, pressing their palms together, and hooks his thumb up over hers. “I guess.”

When he finally looks at her again she's staring at their hands.

"Nick," Jess says. Her voice is low. She takes in a quick, audible breath. "You -"

He leans in and kisses her. It's sloppy and too eager, he knows that, but he's found Jess annoyingly ( _frustratingly_ ) hot since the day he met her, with her throaty smoker's laugh and her 1920s singing and the way she disdainfully pronounces adult words like a seven year old kid who still believes in cooties. He wants to wring her neck and then bite his way up the tendon at her throat. He wants to scream at her about the importance of human dignity and then kiss her hard against a wall, bruising her lips, his knee between her legs.

(He's super messed up when it comes to girls right now.)

Her tongue licks tentatively into his mouth, skimming across his bottom lip and _fuck_ , she’s kissing him back. He sinks into the way that Jess tastes, flat and acidic at the same time, like the white wine she's been drinking. He can feel the muscles of her throat shift underneath his fingertips. And Nick was already rocking the dizzies from the sheer amount of alcohol he's made friends with tonight, so what they're doing now is eating up the last shreds of oxygen he has left, making his head spin.

He breaks the kiss, gasping for air.

"Nick," Jess says softly after a minute, staring at him with the strangest expression on her face.

"Shut up," he says, because talking right now is going to lead to nowhere good.

Her lips tighten. 

"Don't say that to me."

"My photo booth," he slurs, and waves a hand around. "My rules, Jessica."

Her hand fists in the button band of his waistcoat and she jerks him down to her with surprising force. It's like a ninja attack, only way better (a _sexy_ ninja attack), because she's kissing him again and she started it this time. _Jess starts it._ She stands up without breaking the kiss, putting her knee down next to his hip on the bench. He bends his neck back to follow her lips.

Her fingers are hooked into his waistcoat, yanking him forward at the chest. She's looming up over him, half-standing in the cramped photo booth, kissing him dramatically like she's the swarthy, unrelenting lead in some old black-and-white movie and he's the yielding damsel in distress, head thrown back and throat exposed. He's not gonna lie - he's into this, he is really, _really_ into this, _fuck_.

He shifts on the bench and the back of his shoulder blade bumps up against the button on the side. He dimly hears several fast clicks.

(Photographic evidence of this is definitely not a good idea.)

Jess is panting when she breaks the kiss. She moves back and stares down at him, her eyes wide and dark and kind of shocked-looking.

"I know you can do this," she says finally.

And then she's gone.

Which is how he ends up sitting alone in a photo booth with a pretty epic situation going on in the erection department.

He takes a minute to let that sort itself out ( _sorry man_ , he says, patting the photo booth wall, _boner buddies is an awkward way to be, I know that_ ). He straightens out his waistcoat and licks his lips - they taste like girl and lip gloss, a hint of something faintly chemically and fruity that sticks to the corners of his mouth.

He grabs the photo booth pictures on his way out and shoves them deep in his suit pocket.

(He won't find them again until almost a year later, when his simmering attraction to Jess has blown up into the kind of intense crush he can only deal with using the two-pronged technique of stalwart denial coupled with dogged sublimation. He'll stare at the little strip of photos in numb shock. The angle is awkward in the photos, and her hand is blocking most of his face, but there’s just enough detail to see that her eyes are closed and his fingers are tangled up in the curls of her hair. He only half-remembers that they ever made out in a photo booth at some random wedding when she was pretending to be his girlfriend. It's like a plot from a damn sitcom. They never talk about it. It seems unreal. It’s like something that happened to two entirely different people.)

Right now, though, as it turns out: he is really fucking good at the chicken dance.

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/49264283469/sneaking-this-one-in-under-the-wire-for-the-nick) on tumblr!


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